Sen. Barack Obama today wrote a letter to stating he opposed a ban on gay marriage.

In a letter to San Francisco's Alice B. Toklas Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Democratic Club, the presumptive presidential nominee said he opposed "the divisive and discriminatory efforts to amend the California Constitution" and similar efforts in other states.

Good on Obama. He's not afraid to change his mind.

Obama is skating gingerly past his previous position on the issue.

The Illinois senator has said repeatedly that he believes marriage should be only between man and a woman. When the California Supreme Court overturned the state's ban on same-sex marriage in May, Obama released a carefully nuanced statement saying he respected the court's decision, believed states should make their own decisions on marriage and "will continue to fight for civil unions as president."

We're behind Obama on this one, all the way.

A federal judge in California Wednesday ruled that Bush's warrantless electronic surveillance runs afoul of FISA:

“Congress appears clearly to have intended to — and did — establish the exclusive means for foreign intelligence activities to be conducted,” the judge wrote. “Whatever power the executive may otherwise have had in this regard, FISA limits the power of the executive branch to conduct such activities and it limits the executive branch’s authority to assert the state secrets privilege in response to challenges to the legality of its foreign intelligence surveillance activities.”

Judge Walker’s voice carries extra weight because all the lawsuits involving telephone companies that took part in the N.S.A. program have been consolidated and are being heard in his court.

The opinion is here (pdf). [More...]

15 hostages, including 3 Americans have been rescued from FARC in Colombia.

French-Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt, three US nationals and 11 other hostages were rescued from Marxist FARC rebels Wednesday, freed from years in captivity by a daring Colombian military raid.

Betancourt, who was captured in 2002, and the three Americans held since 2003, were rescued along with 11 Colombian soldiers in dramatic fashion when the Colombian military infiltrated a rebel jungle camp and removed them by helicopter.

A plane carrying the Americans, Defense Department Contractors, is about to land in Texas.

Sen. John McCain was in Colombia today and said he was told about the rescue while there. He said it was a coincidence.

Via NPR, Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, the court's first African American Justice, would have turned 100 today.

Check out this clip -- billed as a "lost interview" between Marshall and Mike Wallace. Though it's undated, Marshall talks about Adam Clayton Powell's controversial support of Republican president Dwight Eisenhower and the Democratic Party's failure to act on segregation in the South.

Our thanks are due to the ACLU and the EFF for their tireless efforts to safeguard our privacy in the age of electronic information. As technology changes, the government finds new ways to circumvent the Fourth Amendment. These organizations do their best to stay on top of the government's intrusion into our electronic lives.

The ACLU made a Freedom of Information Act request (pdf) to the Justice Department seeking information about the government's warrantless tracking of cell phone locations.

The ACLU filed the FOIA request in November following media reports that federal officials were using Americans' cellular phones to pinpoint their locations without a warrant or any court oversight, the groups said. Some government officials at the time said they did not need probable cause to obtain tracking information from mobile phones. In addition, the reports said some federal law enforcement agents had obtained tracking data from wireless carriers without any court oversight.

The Justice Department declined the request. The ACLU and the EFF responded by filing suit (pdf) to compel the disclosure.

So now we know, McCain is soft on Communism:

Sen. John McCain has denied the allegation made by Sen. Thad Cochran that he grabbed a Sandinista by the shirt collar in a confrontation that reportedly happened 21 years ago. Sen. Thad Cochran told the story to the Sun Herald this week, saying McCain grabbed an associate of Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega and pulled him from a chair during a 1987 diplomatic mission.

I am snarking, for those who do not get it.

By Big Tent Democrat, speaking for me only

The only chance, imo, McCain has to win this election is to go nasty, via third parties if possible, on Barack Obama. Eric Boehlert reports on one of the planned assaults:

The notorious [Swift Boaters'] group also remains a hot topic because the same publisher of the anti-Kerry Swift Boat book, Regnery Publishing, is planning to release an August book on Sen. Barack Obama called, The Case Against Barack Obama. The book's roll-out will be pushed by the same well-connected conservative public relations firm, Creative Response Concepts, that was behind the Swift Boat blitz. Conservatives hope to catch lightning in a bottle again and derail the Democratic nominee with the release of this sensational book, but in order to disrupt Obama, the publisher will have to do more than lob all sorts of wild accusations. It will have to enlist the help of the Beltway media.

(Emphasis supplied.) After using the Beltway Media to whine about General Clark, McCain has boxed himself in on the necessary dirty attacks that he would need to be made on Barack Obama for McCain to win in November. And for what? For three days of early July coverage? More . . .

Ed Kilgore writes:

And those who accuse [Obama] of cynicism for expressing heretical thoughts on FISA . . . now are perhaps the real cynics, who somehow thought he didn't really mean all his early talk about transpartisan politics or overcoming the stale debates of past decades.

The problem with this is that Obama is not being "heretical" on FISA, he is totally flip flopping on FISA. He said he would filibuster any FISA bill that included telecom immunity. Now he acts as if he never said that. As Glenn Greenwald points out:

The issue is not . . . [as] Obama-cheering Ed Kilgore put it -- that Obama is "stray[ing] from Democratic Party orthodoxy or from strict down-the-line partisanship" by "expressing heretical thoughts on FISA" . . . [t]he issue is that Obama has repeatedly, over the course of the last year, made emphatic commitments and clear statements about his own core political values that are completely irreconcilable with his support for the FISA bill.

And Ed STILL does not understand that the fundamental reason John Kerry lost in 2004 was because the American People did not believe he would stand for something:

February 2008:

"The thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine," Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.), also a senior member of the Appropriations panel, told the Boston Globe recently. "He is erratic. He is hotheaded. He loses his temper and he worries me."

But in the last 5 months, apparently McCain has matured:

. . . Though Sen. Cochran saw the incident he described to you, decades have passed since then and he wanted to make the point that over the years he has seen Sen. McCain mature . .

Must be dog years Cochran is talking about.

By Big Tent Democrat, speaking for me only

A story in yesterday's Washington Post seems to imply that there is something nefarious (or at least newsworthy) about the fact that Barack Obama financed the purchase of his Chicago home with a mortgage loan that Northern Trust extended at an interest rate that was "below the average" interest rate offered at the time for 30 year fixed rate loans. He paid 5.625 percent while the average was 5.93 percent.

As this response points out, interest rates are determined in part by creditworthiness. Senator Obama, with a good job, the recent sale of a condo, a recently signed book deal that promised to give him more than the price he paid for the house, little debt, and (presumably) a strong credit history, was extraordinarily creditworthy. So where's the story?

Five people are serving life sentences for causing an explosion that killed six Kansas City firefighters in 1988. Questions are surfacing about the conduct (or misconduct) of a federal investigator who may have pressured witnesses to lie in order to develop what was nonetheless a weak case against the five defendants.

Five who testified in the case admit they lied to the federal grand jury that indicted the defendants or later at their trial. The other witnesses said they refused to change their stories.

Rep. Emanual Cleaver and a federal judge called for an investigation.

“I think this is something the Justice Department really ought to look into,” Senior U.S. District Judge Scott O. Wright said recently. Wright did not preside over the 1997 trial of the five defendants. But he excoriated federal authorities when they used his courtroom to try to retaliate against an uncooperative witness.

The U.S. Attorney's office will comply with that request (really, does it have a choice?). [more ...]

Former (my bad, Lott is the former MS Senator) GOP Senator Thad Cochran, who hates John McCain, knows that McCain has a reputation as a hothead. So here he is telling an uncomplimentary story that plays to the idea McCain is a hothead who has no control of his temper:

Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., said he saw McCain, who has a reputation for being hot tempered, rough up an Ortega associate during a trip to Nicaragua led by former Sen. Bob Dole, R-Kan. . . .

"I looked down there and John had reached over and grabbed this guy by the shirt collar and had snatched him up like he was throwing him up out of the chair to tell him what he thought about him or whatever . . . I don't know what he was telling him but I thought, 'Good grief, everybody around here has got guns and we were there on a diplomatic mission.' I don't know what had happened to provoke John, but he obviously got mad at the guy ... and he just reached over there and snatched ... him."

Time for the GOP to cut Cochran loose. More . ..